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Who it is : Bruce McCandless II , aNASAastronaut , testing the Manned Maneuvering Unit ( MMU ) during blank shuttle mission STS-41 - B vitamin
When it was take : Feb. 7 , 1984
Where it is : Low Earth orbit
Why it ’s so special : This week is the 40th anniversary of the first untethered spacewalk . On Feb. 7 , 1984 , NASA cosmonaut Bruce McCandless II whip on a deal - controlled haversack and , propelled by its nitrogen gas pusher , flew out of the quad birdie Challenger freight bay . He got to about 320 feet ( 98 meters ) from the spacecraft , becoming the first human to attempt a spacewalk without a safety tether . McCandless orbited Earth — as the first human orbiter — for 1 hour , 22 moment .
The mo was eternalize by Robert " Hoot " Gibson , Challenger ’s pilot . He used a Hasselblad camera to capture McCandless fly alone high above Earth . The images became arguably the most iconic of the entire space bird program .
Related:15 jaw - dropping spacewalk range of a function
Although the images were unplanned , Gibson knew instantly that they would be iconic , so he take three short - meter recitation and checked the focussing four times for each photo , according to NASA . He even angle the photographic camera to check that the sensible horizon was stratum in the images .
" It may have been one small step for Neil,“McCandless saidas he revolve Earth solo , " but it ’s a heck of a big jump for me . " ( His quip , of course , referenced Neil Armstrong ’s famous wrinkle , " That ’s one small step for a man , one giant leap for human race , " when taking the first human footstep onthe moon15 year earlier . )
— quad photo of the week : Hubble catches a ' baseball game galaxy ' with a black maw kernel
— infinite pic of the week : Ancient ' maze of night ' on Mars , one of the biggest mazes in the solar organization
— Space photo of the calendar week : lookout station , or foreign satellite ? Boggle your intellect with this 360 - degree figure
Fittingly , McCandless do as the voice of NASA ’s Mission Control during 1969 ’s Apollo 11 and 1971 ’s Apollo 14 foreign mission . His second and final spacefaring was in April 1990 on the STS-31 mission to deploy theHubble Space Telescopeinto Earth ’s orbit from the space shuttlecock Discovery loading alcove . He pass away in 2017 , at age 80 . His haversack , theMMU , is on display at the National Air and Space Museum ’s Steven F. Udvar - Hazy Center in Chantilly , Virginia . The MMU was used during three missions in 1984 before being retired for condom reasonableness .
